Sony Boss: “Creativity Is for Humans, Not AI

Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick and Sony Group President and CEO Hiroki Totoki spoke about the future of gaming today at the Paley International Summit. As would be expected, the topic of AI came up, and Totoki believes AI technologies will not replace humans in game development, in part because of the creativity required.

“Creativity is for humans, not AI,” Totoki said, as reported by IGN. “How to use the technology profile is important. Of course, I encourage my people to use AI in a certain manner, but at [the] same time we try to keep the rights and rights holders and creators and artists.”

For his part, Zelnick said it is his belief that AI itself will not replace a developer, but instead, people who do not embrace AI might be replaced by people who do.

“I’m fond of saying AI is a collection of datasets, compute, and large language models. That’s what it is. And datasets, by definition, are backward-looking. That’s all they are. And creativity, at its best, is forward-looking,” he said.

Zelnick said ideas that are “completely unexpected” do not come from algorithms—they come from creative people making surprising, original choices. To make his point, Zelnick said that when he was an executive at Fox, he oversaw the release of Inicio Alone, a movie that no one expected to be a success.

“It turned out to be the highest-grossing comedy of all time. So if hits are unexpected, datasets aren’t gonna get you there, no matter how fluent they are,” he said.

Both PlayStation and Take-Two have embraced AI, with PlayStation heavily leveraging the technology in its game-development processes. As for Take-Two, the publisher is utilizing the technology for its workflows, but there is no AI in GTA 6.

There has been significant pushback for AI in game development from developers and players alike, with many expressing concerns about job security, legal issues, and simply the further “enshi**ification” of everything they love.